Jonathan's blog

The other day, I was suddenly taken by an urge to build a pinhole camera. I vaguely recall building one out of a shoebox at primary school that projected a dim image onto some tracing paper, but now that I have the equipment and a little experience in developing films at home, I thought it might be fun to make a pinhole camera that can work with film to make permanent images.

Medium-format sheet film is the ideal thing for such an application. While I have the stuff to develop 120 film, I don’t have any means of scanning it. So my system will be using regular 35mm film, which is more convenient for me.

This got me thinking about how to mount the film in the pinhole camera. Obviously when using small film, the camera needs to be shorter to project a smaller image. Could be fiddly to load individual frames of 35mm film into an oxo box! So I wondered about using the body of my Canon AE-1 Program, basically as a film holder.

But I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to cut a hole in the side of a cereal box and shove a camera in there without letting light in. So I considered building a pinhole camera around the body of my AE-1. Maybe I could jam a toilet roll tube into the FD mount, or something.

Then I found this much more sensible guide, Making a pinhole lens for an SLR. It describes how to make a body cap into a pinhole “lens”. It’s completely light-proof, easy to make, and causes no damage to the camera (assuming you have a second body cap).

So, I’ve ordered a body cap from eBay and I will be making it into a pinhole “lens”. I will, of course, scan and post the results on my photo blog. There will probably be some kind of review on this blog, too. Watch this space!

As much as I hate Facebook for its annoying apps, there are one or two good ones.

Cities I’ve Visited is one such app that I like. You can add new cities either by scrolling, zooming & clicking, or by typing in a name. I like maps so I find it pretty interesting to see where I’ve been.

The application itself uses the Google Maps API so it’s interactive. Unfortunately the embedded version of this app for blogs is just a static image. You can’t change the zoom level or centre point, which is annoying, since you can see I’ve never been to America or Asia.

One day I might have a go at building my own app for fun. It shouldn’t be horrifically difficult to build a simple, single-user app for having an interactive map with points on it. The difficult parts are making it multi-user, and having a system for adding cities by name (rather than by grid reference).

I could even steal the work of my colleague, who built a map of wireless hotspots at Bristol University.

About a year ago, I built a computer based upon the MSI P45 Neo3-FR motherboard. I chose it because it offered the ICH10R chipset with Intel Matrix fakeraid (but that’s a whole other story).

Overclocking

At the time, I was disappointed with the board because I was not able to overclock – not one tiny bit. My CPU is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, and many people had reported large gains in overclocking while still running at a low temperature and with excellent stability.

Naturally I wanted a slice of the overclocking pie – partly for the fun and satisfaction for doing it, and partly to get even more bang for my buck.

The MSI BIOS included lots of settings for overclocking and overvolting the RAM and CPU. However I quickly found that any change whatsoever caused the system to not boot. Of course I started off conservatively and I tried all sorts of combinations but I never got the system to boot with any settings other than the exact defaults.

I was disappointed, but ultimately it wasn’t a big deal. The Core 2 Quad system was still a massive step upwards from my former system – an AMD Athlon X2. Even running at factory settings, it ought to be a very capable system.

Hackintosh

More recently, I’ve been wanting to build a Hackintosh. Fedora is a pretty damn good OS but there are one or two things it can’t do. For example, it doesn’t support my 35mm film scanner, and I can’t play my games.

OS X can do these things, and I greatly prefer it to Windows – even Windows 7, which is the best Windows in a long time, I reckon.

It’s a shame I hadn’t planned to make a Hackintosh before I bought the MSI motherboard, as I would have known that the most compatible boards are the Asus P5Q series.

Still, worth a shot with my P45-based board. I was able to get pretty far – I could get all the way through the OS X installer and it seemed fine. However, booting my freshly installed Snow Leopard caused it to freeze. I read millions of forums (not an exaggeration!) and it seemed that an incompatible BIOS might be the problem.

Some members recommended flashing with a custom-made BIOS, but I considered that a last resort. A sensible first step seemed to be to update to the latest MSI BIOS. Perhaps this alone would get my Hackintosh working and then I could ditch Windows as a secondary OS.

Live Update

MSI provide some Live Update utility that can allegedly update drivers and the BIOS from an ActiveX applet. Naturally it requires Internet Explorer on Windows, which as you can guess is not a combination I run on my computer. (However, I’ve never been able to make it work at all on any MSI-based system, Windows 7 or Vista)

Flashing the BIOS

The alternative is to download the BIOS image and the flashing program. It’s a Windows exe file. Of course Wine doesn’t help in this case because the program needs low-level access to the hardware. My only option is to boot from some kind of Windows media.

According to the readme file that came with the BIOS flashing program:

Boot your system from a Win98 or WinME boot-floppy.
How to make boot floppy in case your don’t have it ready:

• For Win9X, You can type [C:\ format a:/s] from the DOS prompt.
• For WinME, You can make a boot floppy from control panel–> add/remove program–>make boot floppy. Remove autoexec.bat & config.sys file if there’s any.
• For Win2000, there’s no way to make boot floppy, so you have to either use Win9X or WinME boot floppy.
• For WinXP, you can make a DOS boot disk. Go to Your Computer, right click drive A:, select Format, select copy system files.

If you do not have Windows ME or 98 to create the floppy you can make one on a friend’s computer.

Well that’s good, isn’t it. MSI officially recommend that I use a decade-old operating system on some hardware invented in 1983 (before I was bloody born!). Never mind the  fact that I don’t have a DOS boot disk, or a legacy Windows machine, or that my new computer doesn’t have a floppy drive. The solution? Oh it’s OK, I’ll go and ask a friend. Oops, scrap that – they all run BSD.

By chance, I have an IBM Thinkpad 760EL in my drawer, running Windows 3.11. Like all laptops of its era, it has a floppy drive, and being an IBM it still works perfectly. The battery life isn’t what it used to be but it still goes for half an hour and boots faster than a modern laptop running Vista. Of course it was easy to create a bootable DOS system disk.

Less straightforward was getting the BIOS program and image onto this bootable floppy. A straight-from-1991 copy of DOS 5.0 is unlikely to support USB mass storage, I reasoned. I managed to find an old floppy disk and connect it to my PC’s motherboard. My PSU didn’t have a floppy power connector so I had to make one by cutting up some old power cables and twisting the wires together. Finally I was able to boot into Fedora normally, mount the floppy disk and copy the files onto it.

Rebooting seemed to go OK and booting DOS didn’t cause any problems. After I got over my annoyance at the lack of tab completion, flashing the BIOS was easy. I powered off and on to make sure it had worked, and attempted to boot into Fedora.

Oh noes!

Apparently upgrading the BIOS didn’t go so smoothly after all. The new BIOS has more bugs than a dead dog in a New Delhi drain. It just…. doesn’t work.

• My RAM, formerly clocked at its native speed of 1067MHz is now running at 800MHz and can’t be made to go faster.
• My hard disks no longer work in AHCI mode. Random faults and reboots occur. I have to disable AHCI and go with IDE.
• Onboard networking seems to have disappeared.
• Any change to the hard disks (e.g. unplugging one, or swapping two over) cause the system to become non-bootable until the BIOS has been reset by pulling the jumper.
• The CPU fan and case fans now always spin flat out, regardless of what the options are set to. This PC now sounds like a Dyson.

Seriously, if I wanted a computer with IDE disks, slow RAM and no networking, I’d still be using the Thinkpad. The fact that it has been in my drawer for years is a good indication that I do not want these things.

I’ve given up on building a Hackintosh on this hardware. It’s a world of pain. All I want is my old setup back, like it was this morning. However, I haven’t yet worked out how to fix this problem. Probably reverting to an older BIOS is the best way to go – unfortunately I didn’t make a note of which BIOS revision I was running before.

I had a look at the changelog of the various revisions to see if there was any that jumped out at me as a good one to try. Unfortunately there are loads, and even when you get your head around the Engrish, the changelog makes for pretty worrying reading. It’s full of things like this:

Fixed system report incorrect memory size when install 4G memory.

I mean, how on Earth did the original version that didn’t work with 4GB memory get past testing and find its way into a release? The fixed version came over 2 months after the previous version, too.

I guess I’m going to have to try and find a suitable BIOS revision through trial and error, just to get my old system functionality back. And then when I’ve got the spare cash, I will be replacing the board with an Asus P5Q, which will hopefully work with a Hackintosh build.

Oh, and maybe it will let me use AHCI, too.

MSI are useless.

</rant>

Update

To my delight I just found out that the motherboard is two weeks younger than one year old – so eligible for a warranty return. This is a real rarity – usually stuff breaks two weeks after the warranty period.

Ebuyer say I’m only entitled to a replacement, not a refund. However they no longer stock the MSI P45 Neo3 (must have been an unpopular model – can’t think why!) so it’s likely that I’ll get store credit and be able to pick a motherboard that works

For some time, I’ve been taking part in Stu’s Tuesday Challenge.

Recently, Stu has had great success with his East Midlands wedding photography business and so doesn’t have time for the Challenge any more.

So I’ve taken over the Challenge and rebranded it the Photo Challenge (so I’m not tied to a Tuesday). I hope the regular contributors on Stu’s blog will continue to take photos for the Challenges. It’s also an ideal opportunity for new photographers to try their hand at some of the challenges and get some feedback.

Why not give it a go?

You might wonder what there is to discuss about bike lights. But in my several years as an urban commuter cyclist, and with my fascination for toys such as bike lights, I’ve made some observations which might prove useful to other cyclists.

What you need

Before you go out and buy a light, decide what your needs are. Choose a bike light to suit your needs (and budget, of course). If your daily needs cover two or more of these categories, you should consider buying either a light which ticks all of the right boxes, or two lights.

How to mount your lights

When you are riding in traffic and your lights are in flashing mode, I would recommend angling your lights directly forward. Most LED lights are not bright enough to dazzle other drivers, but pointing them forwards will make them appear much brighter, and will cause them to shine into the wingmirrors of cars in front of you.

If in doubt whether your lights are too bright, or inconsiderately aimed, sit in a car and get a friend to ride your bike at you

When riding with very bright lights, it’s plain rude to point them into driver’s eyes. Dip them like every other vehicle.

When riding on an unlit path, don’t use too much light because it dazzles other cyclists. Keep your lights aimed low. Flashing lights aren’t required here to attract attention, and the flashing can make it hard for oncoming cyclists to see.

Branded vs generic

As a student, I was strapped for cash and I would always buy cheap, generic bike lights from eBay. Now I have a job, I always buy Cat Eye.

In my experience, the cheap lights are usually similar in brightness but the beam pattern is never as good as a branded light. Most importantly, the cheap lights have very poor quality brackets which usually snap off long before the light breaks. One such light whose bracket broke has now been turned into a makeshift photography light, which I gave to my brother. I’m so generous!

Nowadays I almost always buy Cat Eye. They are the Coca Cola of the bike accessories world, and I’ve always found them to be consistently high quality in terms of the brackets and the brightness, beam pattern and battery life are excellent. They’re not the cheapest, but I reckon you’ll be pleased if you buy them.

Carrying spares

I think it is crucially important to carry either multiple lights or multiple sets of batteries with you while commuting. Especially with LEDs, it’s not always obvious when the batteries are running out so it’s easy to be caught short. If your lights run from AA/AAA batteries then it’s no problem to keep a spare set in the bottom of your bag all the time.

If you’re lucky enough to own a set of lights with a rechargeable battery pack, it’s not always practical or possible to carry a spare set with you. In this case you’d be wise to keep a spare LED light with you. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap one

Multiple lights

As well as keep a “spare” set with you, you might want to mount two or more lights on your handlebars.

I find that having two lights on the handlebars, both flashing, is a great way to attract attention. They never quite flash in perfect time and this effect is rather eye-catching.

It also means you can put out twice as much light when running in constant mode, which is great news if your commute takes you on unlit roads or paths.

I have 5 headlights on my bike. I have a pair of RSP Asteri 2 LED headlights which I use in flashing mode in the city and dim constant mode on the Bristol-Bath bike path. I have an extremely bright pair of Cat Eye ABS-35 halogens to be used on the unlit sections of the path when there are no oncoming cyclists. They have a thumb switch to turn them off quickly if anyone comes into view. And I also have a head-mounted flasher, a Cat Eye HL-EL400.

Head-mounted lights

Head-mounted bike lights are a controversial topic among cyclists and motorists.

I use a helmet-mounted front and rear light because they can be seen over the tops of cars in heavy traffic. It used to make me nervous that if I was currently being overtaken, the car behind the overtaking car might not be able to see my rear lights mounted in the usual place, below the saddle.

I also think it’s very versatile because you can choose to direct light wherever you turn your head. Part of my journey takes me along a stretch of road that has two lanes. Drivers frequently change lanes without looking sideways, where I often am. If I have a head-mounted flashing light, I can look into the car window, directly at the driver, and then they usually notice my presence.

However, one of my colleagues who drives (and also cycles) says he dislikes head-mounted bike lights because it is impossible to see a cyclist’s eyes and therefore the driver can’t always tell if the cyclist has seen the car.

For some time now I’ve been running Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on my EeePC 901. I’ve been very impressed with it.

Today I was prompted to upgrade to the new version, 9.10. On my connection at work (via Janet) the upgrade didn’t take long at all…

Upgrade Screenshot

After 9 minutes of frenzied downloading, the upgrade itself took around an hour and a half. Afterwards, I rebooted. I like what they’ve done with the UI!

Ubuntu Screenshot

The roll-over animations make it look and feel nice and polished to use. They’ve also paid close attention to certain aspects of the interface, such as the package manager. It’s a breeze to configure the system.

One notable new addition is Ubuntu One, a free cloud storage service. I have no need for it, as I have my own server, but it’s a handy feature for most people.

Most of the stuff is the same old. Most things work the same as they used to, so it takes no time at all to find your way around the new version.

Well done Ubuntu!

This is a rather old email thread (as you can see from the fact I mentioned “in the new year”, i.e. looking forwards to 2009. I consider it good practice to retain the relevant parts of the history when replying, but this conversation has gone on for so long that the formatting is getting a bit silly…

When an email thread gets too long

As someone who frequently makes online purchases, I am a frequent user of courier services. But on this occasion, the seller that I bought from used a courier that I haven’t experienced before – Interlink Express. And I have to say, they’ve done everything right. I am impressed by their level of service, and I think other couriers should follow suit. It’s not exactly rocket science – it’s taking care of the little things.

Firstly, they sent me an email the day before my parcel was due to arrive. This is really handy, as it gives me time to make arrangements to be at home – rather than the usual scenario where it turns up without warning and oh – I’m at work. Commence long drive at inconvenient time to wherever their depot is.

They also sent me an email on the day to let me know the parcel was on the van.

I was also impressed by their online order tracking. It seems to me that most couriers who offer this service have very vague entries such as “Dispatched” and nobody is quite sure what this means. They also never seem to update their status. City Link are pretty bad at this – once I received a parcel from them and for days afterwards it still claimed it was on the van.

Interlink Express provide detailed information on their tracking page and seems to be updated promptly. Of course there’s no excuse for it not to be, in the age of barcodes, databases and PDAs. But it makes a nice change nonetheless.

Here’s what their tracking page says about my order:

When it arrived, I was asked to sign on a touchscreen PDA, and was delighted to find that within a couple of minutes the tracking information had been updated. This is how it’s supposed to work

I recently (mid October) moved my home server into my loft, as its constant noise under my desk was getting on my nerves.

However I found that with a large area of roof exposed to the sun (even the weak Autumn sun), and practically no ventilation the ambient temperature fluctuates enormously.

In October when it was a little warmer and a little sunnier, the temperature would drop almost as low at 10°C and almost as high as 30°C. An ambient temperature of over 25°C seems to drive my disk temperatures up to over 50°C. This constantly changing temperature with high and low extremes is a sure-fire way to break hard disks.

After Week 42, I opened the loft trapdoor, which went a long way to keeping the temperature more constant. Unfortunately it also makes the flat rather cold.

Now it’s much colder outdoors, I’ve closed the trapdoor again and the loft temperature seems pleasantly cool and reasonably constant. Today the temperature up there is a steady 13°C, although the sun hardly shone. That’s cooler than your average air-conditioned data centre – and all free thanks to the crappy British weather

Oh, and the 6 disks are now all between 25°C and 30°C.

• I’m measuring and graphing this using a TEMPer USB thermometer, using Nagios monitoring software with my own plugin and PNP4Nagios to draw the graphs.
• The “outage” between weeks 43 and 44 was caused by the shift from BST to GMT, apparently. I didn’t notice for a while, but restarting Nagios fixed it

I was musing today about the lifetime of my data, and what might happen to it after I die. I’m a jolly character, aren’t I?

But there are two questions here. First there’s the question of my private data – e.g. online banking stuff and other personal documents that I want to keep to myself for now, but may well have to be released to the executor of my will or whatever.

Then there’s the question of the data I’d love to share. For example my photographs and musical recordings – I’d like to think that they will persist long after I’ve gone. Maybe even wind up in a futuristic museum so people can marvel at how we used to live. Perhaps.

Private data

If I died tomorrow, would my family be able to get at my private files? It’s a bit more involved than looking in a box-file on top of my wardrobe. Nobody has an account on my home server and PC except me, and nobody else knows my root password (I hope).

But I don’t want to give anyone access to my data today. I don’t want to create accounts for other people that can access my stuff, and I don’t want to tell anyone my password. Can you imagine telling somebody all your passwords and saying they weren’t allowed to use them until your death?

That’s not to say that my data is totally inaccessible. My disks are not encrypted so booting from a live CD would be an easy way to read the data without having to log on as me. This would be an easy job for most of my geeky friends, but I don’t think my parents, brothers or girlfriend would be able to do it. Would my next-of-kin have the initiative to ask one of my colleagues or friends to “hack” my systems in the event of my untimely death?

I expect if the circumstances of my death were suspicious, police would confiscate my computers anyway and examine them. A police computer expert would have no problem in extracting the data, but whether or not they would hand it over to my family is a different question.

Of course for accounts I hold with third parties, such as online banking, email companies and of course my employers, it is usually possible to present a death certificate and the account will be opened for the executor.^{[1, 2]} But this doesn’t apply to my systems.

The flip-side of allowing access to my data is that the executor or next-of-kin gets access to all of my data. After I die, I may well be happy for the executor of the will to browse my financial and legal documents, but what if I don’t want him or her to know about my plans to take over the world, or my illegal downloads? What if I have some embarrassing secrets that I don’t want my family to find out about?

The only two approaches here are to specify in my will which files should be deleted and which should be kept^[3], or to encrypt everything that I do not wish to be read. Bear in mind that if you wish to make the encryption effective, you will also need to encrypt the backups.

Maybe the best idea would be to write down my password and some brief instructions for accessing my data if necessary, and then seal this in an envelope to be kept in a safe place with my will. Anything I don’t want seen, ever, can be encrypted. Then it should be straightforward for the relevant people to get access to my private documents, with minimal risk of abuse.

Public data

As I touched upon in the introduction, the second section is to do with the longevity of my created data. A large part of this is to do with choosing an appropriate format, and ensuring that the format stays current.

For example, my photos are currently stored on a hard disk, formatted with the ext4 filesystem, and saved as TIFF images. They are backed up, but that’s mainly irrelevant here. The point is that I don’t expect my hard disks to still be working in ten years’ time, and there’s a fair chance that today’s popular filesystems won’t be in widespread use after a decade either.

While I’m alive, it’s easy for me to move my things around. Let’s suppose next year hard disks start to become obsolete and a new type of memory card becomes commonplace. It will be easy for me to copy my photos from my hard disk onto this new memory card. I can also convert my images from their TIFF format to tomorrow’s shiny new format if necessary.

But who will do this after I’m dead?

It was easy for me. After my grandad died, I inherited a box of 35mm slides, as well as some 35mm negatives and some 6″×4″ prints. Things you can see with your eyes don’t tend to go obsolete in a decade. Provided I look after these physical photos and protect them from heat, light and moisture, they are likely to last for decades or centuries.

I’ve also scanned them in and archived them on disk – where they are safe from paper-curling humidity, but still prone to obsolescence as I mentioned above.

So long as I have backups and I keep with the times and convert my photos to whatever format is appropriate and save them on whatever media is current, I can’t see a problem. I could even make prints of all my photos and store them securely.

The snag comes when I die, and I will have to entrust my photos to a descendant. Hopefully they will treasure the photos and look after them, as I am doing with my late grandfather’s work – but there’s no guarantee. If I didn’t have an interest in photography myself, it’s entirely plausible that I might have declined my grandad’s slides.

It seems here that the best approach is to preserve my data while I’m still alive and kicking, and make it known to my family that I wish my photos to be looked after when I’m gone. Hopefully they will take heed!

Perhaps undermining the tone of this whole article, I might add that I’ll be dead so why should I care!

References

1. https://windowslivehelp.com/community/t/150085.aspx
2. http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,26303927-5014239,00.html
3. Maybe this could be automated, and my will could specify the path to a script that deletes some things and preserves others.